Now I can hate every moment of its existence on more than one platform!
Having dealt with it for years, it's unadulterated pain and bad performance and nothing else.
Having dealt with it for years, it's unadulterated pain and bad performance and nothing else.
So even if you're currently using or thinking about using .NET xplat and don't have any plans to use MSBuild, this move is necessary for us working on .NET to get xplat builds working.
For mobile, Xamarin Forms can be a little difficult to wotk with, but it's getting better all the time. I don't really want to bother with learning native development at the moment, and because we have a pile of calculations and logic in our shared PCL Xamarin is working out for us.
There is some criticism that the pricing model makes it expensive for people developing at the low end of the mobile market ($1 or $2 apps), however I think that's more a failure of that kind of market in general rather than a problem with Xamarin pricing itself.
Also its not even the right tool to build .net stuff. Add the shoddy dependency resolution steps plus the shitty performance of NTFS on lots of small files (MFT contention) we have to wait 8 minutes for a build. I wrote my own system in powershell and we're down to two minutes. Also, powershell sucks awfully too but that's another story.
Frustratingly I've played around with golang on and off for around two years now. I've not written anything significant in it yet (lack of opportunity more than anything else). You know what's cool about it?
I mastered the entire build system in about an hour and its the same on all platforms and it just works and works quickly.
MS: go look there for some inspiration. Building stuff for the CLR is horrible.
What's not to love!?